Over the long next three days Wyatt’s whereabouts were unknown. The college tried to contact him. He didn't answer his phone. He hadn’t reported to work. He hadn't notified his employer. For the first time I was told that Wyatt was schizophrenic. That was the confidential information his special needs counselor had felt ethically—and was perhaps legally—forbidden to tell me. The college was finally able to get hold of Wyatt's parents, who had provided some additional information. Wyatt had often neglected to take his prescribed medication, his parents said, and this sort of incident, they sadly acknowledged, was the typical result. Now they didn’t know where he was either. Although college staff who spoke with them said his parents seemed both concerned and cooperative, other persons questioned their sincerity. Perhaps they were in fact protecting their son, some speculated, even hiding him. No one could be certain. The knowledge that Wyatt was mentally ill fueled further conjecture. A lunatic on the loose! My colleagues and associates tried to reassure me and to amuse themselves with bad jokes and tall tales of the criminally insane.

I consulted my colleague Dr. Olson. I knew that her oldest son was schizophrenic. She had written stories and poems of his condition and its effect upon him and his family. I remembered her poignant descriptions of him as a child, how he had sat on the davenport and wrapped his arms around himself in an embrace and rocked himself into an hypnotic trance, his back and head bouncing endlessly back and forth and back and forth against the cushion. Eventually he had been institutionalized. After one visit to see him, Dr. Olson showed me a notebook her son had filled with arithmetic notations related to the ages and birth dates of every person her son had ever known or heard about, their names, birthdays, and ages recorded on organized charts. The notebook, only one of several volumes, included hundreds of names all neatly printed in pencil—family, friends, associates, celebrities, historical figures, both the living and the dead—all part of some mysterious private numerology her son had laboriously fabricated in the throes of the obsessive-compulsive disorder which comprised only one small symptom of his terrible illness.

But, try as I might, I could recall nothing in Wyatt’s behavior that resembled what Dr. Olson had shown me or described. I dug Wyatt’s term paper from my files and studied it carefully mark by mark. Still normal, still average, still flat and incoherent in an ordinary way, still sane and—yes—still C. Caring for her son had compelled Dr. Olson to educate herself on mental illness, on schizophrenia in particular, and on that subject she was the best authority I knew personally. Her informed and eloquent appeals for social understanding, compassion, and community support for the mentally ill had often appeared on the editorial pages of the local newspaper.  

“Schizophrenics are no more violent than the rest of the population,” she assured me. “Statistics show again and again that schizophrenics are in fact even less likely to be violent than the so-called sane.”

Her son did get angry, she said, as we all do, and he had on occasion cursed and threatened others, herself included, but he had never actually become physically violent or hurt anyone. Of whom among us could not the same be said, she seemed to ask. But in the search for Wyatt and for more information about his illness another person on the college staff had called the county board of mental health. A psychologist there had cited the same statistics as Dr. Olson but with one stipulation.

“Although highly unlikely and improbable, it is possible that Wyatt might become violent,” she warned. “We should not ignore the fact that schizophrenics—sometimes—do act out their delusions.”

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INSANITY to be continued